Your Right to Know

A rocket slammed into a building in Syria’s northern city of Aleppo, and two suicide bombers
struck near a mosque in the south yesterday, capping a particularly bloody week in the country’s
civil war with more than 800 civilians killed.

The residential building was in a part of Aleppo controlled by regime forces, as was a
university hit earlier in the week in an attack that killed 87 people, mostly students.The
government accused rebels in both attacks, saying they hit the locations with rockets, a claim the
opposition denied.

If confirmed, it would signal that the rebels have acquired more-sophisticated weaponry from
captured regime bases and now are using them to take the fight more into government-held areas in
an attempt to break a monthslong stalemate.

Rebels have in the past posted videos showing them capturing heavy rockets — apparently of the
style fired from truck-mounted launchers — at regime military bases that they have overrun. But it
is unclear whether the fighters are able to use any of the rockets. Their main weaponry are
automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

The opposition has denied being behind the Aleppo university strike and the hit yesterday on the
residential building, which one activist group said killed 12 people. The Local Coordination
Committees of Syria, an activist group, and the Aleppo Media Center, a network of anti-regime
activists, said the government hit the building in an airstrike.

“It was an air raid,” said Aleppo-based activist Abu Raed al-Halabi. When asked why the regime
would attack a government-held area, al-Halabi said most people in Aleppo are opposed to the
regime.

Even if the rebels have surface-to-surface rockets it won’t be a turning point in their battle
against the regime of President Bashar Assad, said Aram Nerguizian, a Middle East security expert
at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Such rocket systems don’t affect the regime’s air power and could politically backfire, he said,
since “these inaccurate systems are more likely to produce either no impact or kill more civilians
than Syrian military forces.”

Yesterday’s strike in Aleppo and suicide car bombings in the southern town of Daraa occurred
during a particularly bloody week in Syria’s nearly 2-year-old conflict. Since the previous Friday,
more than 1,000 people have been killed, including 804 civilians, 214 soldiers and 20 army
defectors fighting with the rebels, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a
London-based activist group that gathers information from a network of contacts on the ground.

Also yesterday, an Al-Jazeera TV correspondent was killed in Syria, the second journalist to
lose his life in as many days covering the civil war. Mohammed al-Masalmeh was shot to by a sniper
while covering fighting in his hometown of Busra al-Harir in the south. A day earlier, French
journalist Yves Debay was killed by a sniper in Aleppo.

About 200 civilians were killed this week in government-controlled areas. The bulk of them died
in the strike on the university in Aleppo and in a mass killing Thursday in the central town of
Haswiyeh, where opposition activists say a pro-government militia torched houses and killed more
than 100 people.